Can't the Dodgers just call up Eric Cyr instead?

Fortunate that he's been so bad we won't have to worry about making the team anyway.

anyway, now i just need to find a place to live...

And also Bob may ignore your existence from now on. Or at least refuse to admit where you actually live.

But you have "trainwreck" and "underdog" I believe who may be able to point you to some places to live.

Is the job in "The City?" (Get used to that as well as never ever use the word "Frisco.")

Congrats, Vishal! We're all Californians in the end (except those of us who aren't).

oh, i know not to call it "frisco". i went to college in the bay area, after all. :) honestly, san francisco is my favorite city in the world and i can't wait to be up there. it's a great place, i just hate their baseball team. fortunately there is a team right across the bay in oakland that i am also a fan of.

And again!

And again!

thanks for not minding me cluttering up your blog with my personal stuff, jon. it's just that i spend so much time here that i felt like sharing with everyone.

Come on now, Vishal. You can show a little more school pride than that. "Bay Area" could mean lots of things, some of which are unsavory.

Congrats on the job, my good man. Seems like just yesterday that you headed off for grad school. They grow up so fast!

You know, they never mentioned this pitcher's name, it was as if this was some imaginary character.

Meh. Must be a masters student.

I personally don't like bringing up 19 year olds because if something goes wrong, they end up out of options at age 22 and you have to ship them away for middle relief.

That's why I can't stand the sense of entitlement (for at least a bowl game, if not more) felt by fans of perennial powers. I have UCLA students whining about losing a game or two, and I just feel sorry for them. When your team usually sucks, it's much easier to extract joy from small victories.

It's one of the reasons I can't imagine being a Yankee fan.

Or six.

Then see if you guessed right:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/sotd/archives/233

They were no Chad Durbin, let me tell you.

10 18 - Combine these two ideas: live in the Mission. I see more LA caps in the Mission than I do anywhere else, perhaps as many as SF Jint caps...

anyway, i for one can't wait for saturday. i think this is going to be a great year. i've promised myself that if somehow we make it to the rose bowl, i'm going. i was going to fly out from china early if it happened last year, but alas... the arizona game.

I pity them...

I was up in SF for the All Star Game festivities this year.

Of course, you have nothing on what is going down here at the Coliseum. Lived here all my life and never seen anything like this ever. The expectations are so sky high right now, if they don't win by 50 on Saturday, I don't know what the fans will do.

Here are the guys who had two in a row:
http://www.bb-ref.com/pi/shareit/yU8y

thanks again, gobears, brock, xei, et al. DT is like a web-based cheers bar for me. :)

[51 ] thanks for the tip! i'll check it out.

[41 ] i'm trying not to be picky about neighborhoods. i'd like to be near BART though.

http://tinyurl.com/2v937q

Two of them happened this year.

also, props to andy from baseball-references for correctly using "fewer" instead of "less".

UCLA football is really good at beating people down, such as Brock.

The 39-year-old Luis Gonzalez hasn't started in five of the Dodgers' last eight games, but he isn't becoming accustomed to sitting. And he has no intention of doing so, meaning his time with the Dodgers could be up when his contract expires at the end of the season. Asked whether he saw himself coming back to play under similar circumstances, Gonzalez replied, "No, no, not here. . . . Anything can happen in the last month, but they've got a good nucleus of young kids here and that's their future. I don't know where I'll end up next year. I'll go with an open mind into the off-season and see what happens." So it's unlikely that he'll be back? "I don't want to go on a limb and say that," he said. He paused, then continued, "I mean, look around. I'm not naïve to the game. I've been around. We've got good young players and they're getting the bulk of the load here, especially late in the season." -- LA Times

Not much of a suprise. Looks like he is taking it well.

Sometimes I miss old Coors Canaveral.

Icaros will tell you all his favorite spots in the Tenderloin, too.

Some of us up here were talking about going to the Dodgers-G__nts series so maybe we should make it an outing. It's coming up in 2 weeks I think?

Oh and your comment: "honestly, san francisco is my favorite city in the world and i can't wait to be up there. it's a great place, i just hate their baseball team." sums it up for me, and "fortunately there is a team right across the bay in oakland that i am also a fan of" means your trainwreck's new friend.

What's going on in Matt Kemp's head.
Yesterday, besides straying too far from second base on a line drive to the shortstop (Where he was doubled up and ruined a second/third no out rally), he nearly got tagged out at second earlier by coming off the bag on a single and a bobble by the centerfielder.

This is in addition to a number of base running gaffes by him recently, including this past weekend.

Grady's response that "kids will be kids" is not persuasive. Someone has to rope this guy into shape.

"He ruined a second and third/no out rally" -- maybe, but he was the one responsible for the rally to begin with!

Yes, he makes mistakes that look really bad sometimes. Nomar and Kent have both made many more blunders on the bases than Kemp this year, and I don't see people criticizing their baseball savvy. People seem to have forgiven Mark Sweeney his mental gaffe. And yet people keep hammering away at Kemp irrationally. The double standard is both perplexing and infuriating.

73 - no problem!

---

71 - it's a concern, but he'll learn (hey, that rhymes). Plus, weren't people here worried that Grady would bench the young players when they screw up like that? I thought it was a good sign that he's giving him more leeway, being patient.

But see, that's exactly what I'm talking about. At Cal, a winning record was unexpected and thrilling. The Garden State Bowl was cause for serious celebration and a 3000 mile road trip in an overstuffed van. At UCLA, anything short of a BCS bowl is considered a bad season.

I both envy and pity fanerman and his cohort. I'm sure it's much more fun to watch a great team, but trust me, when Tedford leaves, it's gonna hurt you a lot more than it'll hurt me. You've come to expect a good team. I haven't.

If Cal were ever to win the Rose Bowl, to say nothing of a national championship, I think it would have bad long-term effects on the fan base. Sort of like the Cubbies. Honorable failure is much more noble. I think I've said this before: true love comes through shared pain. If you can be fanatical about a team that stinks, then you KNOW you're a real fan.

I don't know too many UCLA fans that feel that way. I know I don't. It's not like UCLA has even been to a single one in the history of the BCS. The disconnect is between top 20 recruiting classes and 7-6 or 6-7 records.

I expect to play in a Rose Bowl once a decade. If that constitutes unreasonable expectations, well, there we are.

And for some, the happy would taste like sad.

Fair enough. I'd say you're more reasonable than many.

But as a Cal Fan, I'd love to play in even one Rose Bowl in my lifetime.

Almost got there a couple years ago, when Texas leapfrogged us in the final polls, but we got crushed in whatever bowl game we did go to, because our entire receiving corps was out with injuries (and we couldn't slow down Texas Tech).

Or, maybe the disconnect is between the recruiting class rankings and the actual recruiting class quality.

You may not have to wait that long. Cal could do it as soon as this year, or within a decade

Kemp doesn't take the best routes to the ball and doesn't quite seem comfortable going to the fence for a catch (he'll go willingly, but he's not sure how exactly to go). But that's not about baseball IQ. That's about development.

He also swings at some bad pitches, but so do 90 percent of batters. Certainly, given X number of pitches, Kemp will produce more with them than almost anyone in the universe at his age.

So he's a developing player. All that being said, this idea that his head is not in the game strikes me as something invented in the past week.

Can you locate the USA on a globe? You might think it's a ridiculously easy question, but just ask Miss South Carolina about how hard it is.

True, as long as one recognizes that the key word there is "seem." Kemp is definitely prone to blunders, but no more than some other players. It's just that his blunders tend to LOOK really bad and get stuck in people's heads. There is no way in the world that he makes more offensive and defensive blunders than, to name one, Nomar. Nomar gets thrown out by a mile stupidly trying to go from first to third on a single, and everybody pats him on the butt and says nice effort. Kemp gets hung out to dry on a line drive double play, and it looks really bad and everyone wonders where the kid's head is. But the bottom line is that in either case the sum total is the same; the baserunner still got thrown out.

Kemp, on the bases and in the field, suffers from the same malady that Wilson Betemit did batting. His bad plays simply look worse than other people's, and so people start judging him emotionally based on how those bad plays made them feel, instead of on his actual performance.

And even if I'm completely wrong about this -- even if Kemp does make far more blunders than anyone else on the team -- his hitting more than makes up for it.

93. Maybe. Of course, if we get to the Rose Bowl because $C is in the BCS title game elsewhere (I don't know where that is this year), it won't mean as much. I guess what I want is one outright Pac-10 title in my lifetime, whatever the bowl-game implications of that.